Lander County, Nevada

• Income premium: Households earn well above the national median, supporting strong retail and housing markets.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 16.4 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Retail Trade employs 271 workers (48.4% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $29,789. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 551 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $921M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Other Services (except Public Administration) averages $111,368 while Retail Trade averages $29,789, a 3.7x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Animal Production and Aquaculture concentrates at 5.32x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 4 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 77.2% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: resident household spending. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.4x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 77.4% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 22.3% of housing units are vacant, above the Nevada rate of 9.3%, and up from 17.3% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 38.4% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 11.3% of the vacant stock, or 2.5% of all housing units against the 22.3% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Affordable rent tiers: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $43,586 can pay without cost burden (~$1,090/mo), and 29.3% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Healthy participation: 61.9% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Lander County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Lander County shows strong potential for animal production and aquaculture attraction, with a 5.32x concentration and 34 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Resident household spending accounts for 77.2% of it, with repair and maintenance the largest single sub-sector at 41.9%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.